Tina Brown's 'Muslim Rage' cover

Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, a Washington-based non-profit for the Palestinian cause, talks to POLITICO (edited for the sake of clarity):

The cover is shocking. I thought it was a joke.

The imagery is exremely unhelpful to say the least. It is an extremely small fraction of the Muslim world that is acting out. For a legitimate, mainstream publication to portray the situation as "Muslim Rage" -- as if this is a vast and widespread response among the all adherents of this religion -- is only feeding this "clash of civilizations" mentality that is extremely unhelpful.

It would be like a publication in the Arab world running a spread of Terry Jones and a few other people of his like burning Qurans, or doing really violent, hateful things, and calling it "American Rage." That is not the type of messaging we need right now. It's irresponsible. They want to sell magaziness, but they're appealing to the lowest of the low. It's just shocking.

SInce this has started, all the major television networks have been characterizing this as a generalization. I saw CNN's Wolf Blitzer turn to one of his guests and ask, "Why do they hate us?" But who is "they"? These are the reactions that happen in the wake of a truly ignorant moment that you would hope we had passed.

I don't think the discourse in the media truly represents national opinion. As I said earlier, they are appealing to the lowest of the low, and nuance is not very popular among the lowest common denominator. But to have the discourse, by leaders in the mainsteream media, boiled down to, "They hate us," is extremely discouraging eleven years after 9/11. It's the kind of thing that creates more problems than it solves.

It's one thing if it remains on the extreme margins of discourse, but once it starts creeping into the mainstream, that's when it becomes really dangerous... It's playing to Islamophobic stereotypes.

The most famous magazine editor of her generation is engaged in a desperate and operatic struggle, which almost no one anywhere believes has any chance of success, to reinvent Newsweek as a sustainable business proposition...

...She is, in a sink hole of cost, trying to use old-media tricks to meld The Daily Beast and Newsweek into the kind of zeitgeist-shaping, buzz-creating, cocktail-party-fueling package that the media has, for so long, been built around -- part craft, part culture, part snobbery. Rather a great age, if you were part of it.